체홉의「결투」: 개인과 이념의 대립

Abstract

This article situates Anton Chekhov’s novella “The Duel” (1891) within the genealogy of the duel in Russian culture and literature, tracing its transition from an imported, legally proscribed practice to a nineteenth-century honor ritual among urban nobles and officers. Against this background—shaped by imperial legislation, an ethos of honor and fatalism, and literary precedents from Pushkin and Lermontov—the novella demythologizes the duel by recoding it as an arena of ideas rather than a heroic rite. Through the confrontation between Laevsky and the zoologist von Koren, Chekhov stages a contest between social-Darwinist utilitarianism (inflected by Spencer/Darwin) and a counter-ethic embodied not in programmatic doctrine but in ordinary decency and Christian pity (Samoilenko, the deacon Pobedov). The narrative highlights both interpersonal and intrapersonal conflict, exposing how small acts of concealment and self-deception escalate toward violence, even as the climactic duel is defused through contingent human intervention (“moles” metaphor) rather than metaphysical judgment. Eschewing tragic closure, Chekhov arrives at an anti-heroic, agnostic ending that suspends final truth claims (“no one knows the truth”) and reorients the question of justice from retribution or elimination to the rearrangement of relations and small ethical corrections in everyday life.